by Steve White
Jason did not dare let himself make eye contact with the other two humans. He could only give the alien a look of innocent incomprehension—not that the alien would necessarily recognize it as such—and hope the others were doing the same. “What do you mean?”
“Our time is limited,” said the alien. “So let us not waste it with denials. You clearly belong to this planet’s dominant species. Yet you are evidently familiar with advanced technology, for you failed to react to it as did your companion here. This merely confirms what I and the Teloi already know.”
“The … ?”
“Those whom this planet’s inhabitants call ‘gods,’ ” the alien explained. “Eighty-two of this planet’s years ago they detected an energy surge of unknown nature—certainly nothing that the local cultures could produce. When your probe appeared and subsequently disappeared, they drew the obvious conclusion—as did we.” For all the impossibility of reading emotions in an alien face and body, Jason would have sworn that this being somehow wore a look of bemused wonder. “We had always believed time travel to be a fundamental impossibility. But it was the only hypothesis that accounted for the facts.”
Nagel had been sitting silently, passive almost to the point of listlessness. Now, with startling abruptness, he came out of his stupor and spoke in a rush. “Wait a minute. Wait a minute! What is happening ? Who are these ‘Teloi’? What are they doing here, in our world’s past? What are you doing here? And who are you?”
“Yes!” Deirdre leaned forward fiercely. “Who are you? What’s your name , for God’s sake?”
Jason sighed. There was obviously no further point in trying to deny that they were time travelers. “It would be nice to have a name to address you by,” he said reasonably.
The alien’s posture seemed to relax a bit. Indeed, Jason thought he could detect a distinct sense of relief. “You may call me Oannes. And as for the rest … you really don’t know, do you?” He cast a glance at the instrumentation. “There is no real danger of detection, and the submarine’s automatic pilot is holding position. And I see some explanation is in order.
“The Teloi, as you have doubtless inferred, are of extraterrestrial origin. Their superficial physical resemblance to this planet’s primates is sheer coincidence—a rare case of convergent evolution. About a hundred thousand of your years ago, a group of Teloi landed on this planet—or, more accurately, were left stranded on it.”
“What?” Jason struggled to understand, fending off the soft blubbery arms of physical exhaustion. “You mean they were exiles?”
“Not really. Their ‘exile’ was entirely self-imposed.” Oannes seemed to gather his thoughts. “This may not be easy for you to understand. The Teloi are a very old race, whose development halted long, long ago. They are the end product of ages of … breeding for selected traits.” Jason recognized this as the closest one could get to “genetic engineering” in the Achaean Greek that was their common language. “Their ancestors sought to turn their race into gods. On their own terms, they succeeded. For one thing, they became immortal.”
“That’s preposterous!” snapped Nagel. “Nothing in the universe lasts forever—not even the universe itself.”
“Oh, not literally immortal, in the sense of living for eternity. But they do not age during the entire course of their lifespans, until the very end. And those lifespans are, if not eternal, close enough to it as makes little difference on your time scale … or even on mine, and my race lives many times as long as yours. So neither of us can really conceive of what it must be like. It must be hellish beyond our capacity to imagine.”
“People have always thought of immortality as the ultimate gift,” Deirdre said quietly.
“That is because they have never had the opportunity to actually experience it,” Oannes said bluntly. “A limited lifespan is all we know, or can know; so we take for granted the significance our lives derive from their brevity. An endless existence is also a meaningless one.”
“How can you possibly know this?” challenged Nagel. “You said before that you aren’t immortal, even though you live longer than we.”
Oannes was unruffled. “We know it from observation. We have been in contact with the Teloi for a long time … and have been at war with them for almost that long.”
Jason put awe into his voice. “So you have the ability to travel among the stars?” He risked a quick, quelling glance at his companions. Deirdre evidently remembered his earlier admonition, for she maintained an expressionless silence. Nagel seemed about to blurt out his bewilderment, but clamped his mouth shut at the last instant.
“Yes.” Oannes showed no sign of having noticed the byplay, to Jason’s relief. “Long ago we discovered how to get around the fundamental structure of the universe and evade the limiting velocity of light. So it seems each of our societies has achieved something the other regarded as impossible. But at any rate, we have known of the Teloi for some time. We know of their lives. They attempt to fill the emptiness with pleasure-seeking and elaborate intrigue and—for the minority so inclined—scholarship and art that for ages have merely excavated deeper and deeper strata of pedantry and abstraction. Creativity is no longer even a memory for them. The selective breeding that produced them has left their minds so structured as to be incapable of escaping into outright madness, although one may doubt how truly sane any of them are by now. Their war with us must have come as a welcome relief; it gave them something real to do. But interstellar warfare, by its nature, can occupy only a relatively small cadre of specialists. The rest were thrown back on diversions that were ever more decadent and bizarre. And even before that, their capacity for flights of whimsy had been incomprehensible to other minds. In particular, they sought more and more to isolate themselves. Over eons, I imagine, the presence of one’s fellows grows ever more irritating.
“Thus it was, a thousand of your centuries ago, that certain Teloi arranged to have themselves permanently marooned on this world. It was well off their usual spacelanes, but an exploratory probe had revealed a habitable planet with a presentient lifeform which resembled the Teloi’s own evolutionary forbears enough to be thought of not simply as animals but as a kind of sub-Teloi.”
” Homo erectus ,” Jason breathed. Perforce, he used his own language.
“Whatever. A certain group among the Teloi—Clan? Club? Who can say?—arranged to make this world their private preserve. Here, cut off from their own society, they would be the gods their race had always aspired to be. And here they would remain.
“Now if one is going to be a god, the first requirement is worshipers. And, as a practical matter, sentient slaves were necessary. So, using the most promising indigenous species— Homo erectus , did you say?—as raw material, the Teloi created them.”
Deirdre looked like she was struggling to awake from nightmare, only to find that it was real. “Wait a minute! Are you saying that these Teloi, by, uh, breeding for certain traits, created …” She couldn’t go on.
“Yes,” said Oannes with a gentleness that transcended races and worlds. “They created your species. They strove, if only unconsciously, toward an aesthetic ideal represented by themselves. So the physical appearance of the result represented a compromise between Homo erectus and the Teloi.”
Apes and angels , Jason found himself thinking in some calm mental storm-center. Only … the Teloi aren’t exactly angels.
“But,” Nagel demanded, “what about Homo neanderthalensis ?” Seeing incomprehension, he elaborated. “Another species of the same genus as ours, in this part of the planet during the last … time of extended cold.” Achaean didn’t lend itself to “glacial epoch” either.
“Oh, them. They were an irrelevancy from the Teloi standpoint—a product of independent evolution. Homo erectus evolved into them in the natural course of events, in response to ice age conditions in Europe and western Asia.”
“We think of them as an evolutionary dead end,” said Deirdre softly.
“Your ancestor
s saw to that,” remarked Oannes with unmistakable dryness. “They might have turned out to be so in any case. Or they might have evolved further. The question is moot now. They were doomed the moment your race began moving north from its cradlelands.”
“Moving north?” Jason struggled to understand. “But I thought you said the Teloi bred Homo sapiens —that’s us—as slaves.”
“That was the intention. Your ancestors lived at first in the region of northeast Africa and southwest Asia—not as effectually separated at that time as they have subsequently become—in societies of the Teloi’s own definition. But the Teloi had miscalculated. They had no real conception of the species they had created—the individual variability of its members, and the difficulty of controlling them. Almost immediately, the more independent and adventurous ones began to escape from Teloi control and spread out over the planet, gradually differentiating into the linguistic and physical varieties that exist now.”
“But what about you ?” Nagel persisted. “Where do you come from?”
“Another star, of course. Its location would mean nothing to you. As I mentioned, my race—the Nagommo—have been at war with the Teloi for a long time. Or, to be precise, I should say that we had been at war with them for a long time a little over two thousand of your years ago, at which time we learned of their ancient expedition to this world. Your planetary system is as out of the way for us as it is for them, but one of our survey ships, operating more or less independently as such ships customarily did in the absence of any kind of practical communication with their bases, went to investigate. I was a member of that ship’s crew.” He seemed to notice his listeners’ expressions, and added parenthetically, “As I mentioned, a Nagom lives a long time. At any rate, when we approached this planet we were attacked by the robotic weapons the Teloi had emplaced in orbit to safeguard their privacy. We destroyed them, but in the process we suffered critical damage. Many of us were killed. Those who survived were lucky to manage an emergency landing—a controlled crash, really—in a body of water to the southeast of here, into which the two rivers of a major river-valley system flow from the north.” The Persian Gulf , thought Jason. “So, like the Teloi, we were castaways on this world. The difference is that we were involuntary ones.”
“How did you survive?” Deirdre wondered aloud.
“This planet is habitable for us, even though the air is less dense and less damp than we like, and the average temperature lower. But fortunately we had crashed in fairly low latitudes. And, as you have probably gathered, we are amphibians, so escaping from our sunken ship was no particular problem. Nor was nutrition; a fair number of the local food products are compatible, and we had instruments for determining which those were. At first we entertained hopes of a rescue. But as time passed and no ship arrived, we relinquished our illusions. This world is out of the way, as I mentioned, and no one had known we were coming here. No, we were on our own.”
“Did you have children?” asked Deirdre.
“That was out of the question.”
“You mean all of your group were of one gender?” Nagel ventured.
“Not in the sense you mean.” Oannes looked uncomfortable. “We are fully functional hermaphrodites. But our reproduction involves … Well, our home planet’s rotational cycle is very different from this one’s. Its day is exactly two thirds of its year, which in turn equals only a little more than a hundred of your days. Our reproduction is closely tied to this. On your planet, it simply didn’t work.”
Jason nodded unconsciously. Such a “resonance lock” was the normal fate of a planet in an eccentric orbit within its primary star’s tidelock zone, like Sol’s Mercury. In the case of the smaller, dimmer stars—the M and late K classes—this could coincide with the liquid-water zone where life-bearing worlds could exist. It was a fairly uncommon state of affairs, but he had seen an example … and it was one more confirmation of what he already knew but could not (or would not) admit that he knew.
“That’s terrible!” Deirdre was saying.
Oannes gave a gesture so similar to a human’s fatalistic shrug that Jason assumed he had picked it up locally. “There were compensations. At least we were able to continue pursuing our basic mission.”
“Your ‘basic mission’?” Deirdre queried.
Oannes gave her an odd look. “Why, yes. There were Teloi here for us to combat.”
They stared at him. Jason finally broke the silence. “Uh, Oannes, wasn’t the war kind of over for you and your shipmates?”
Oannes stared in his turn. “But,” he said carefully, as though feeling he must have been misunderstood before, “there were Teloi here, and we knew it. Wherever we find them, we must thwart them if it is within our power to do so. They are …” The alien’s voice trailed off, silenced by something too obvious to be put into words, and his body clenched with some strong emotion.
It would seem, Jason reflected, that to know the Teloi is not to love them.
“But,” Deirdre protested, “how could it have been ‘within your power’ to hinder them? You were a handful of castaways!”
“We were not altogether without resources. Though our ship was wrecked beyond any hope of repair and had sunk to the bottom, it wasn’t too deep for us to salvage a good deal of equipment from it, including many devices designed for survey operations on primitive planets. This vessel, for example.”
Nagel’s old self resurfaced. “It looks in remarkably good repair after two millennia!”
Oannes took no apparent offense at the sarcasm. “Not so remarkable, when one considers that the Teloi’s equipment is still functioning after a hundred millennia. In point of fact, we and they both use metals that can … restore themselves.”
Nagel shut up, and Jason and Deirdre nodded. All three of them understood what Oannes was trying to convey in Achaean. Not that it was common in their world, where the social trauma of the Transhuman movement had largely relegated nanotechnology to a manufacturing technique in orbital factories. But it was possible, though expensive, to leave the construction nanobots permanently active in a manufactured item, to regenerate any damage or deterioration. It couldn’t last forever of course; if nothing else, the cumulative effect of cosmic radiation would either kill or “mutate” the molecular-sized robots. But until then, such a device would show no rust, corrosion or other signs of aging, and any major damage to it would self-repair within certain limits.
None of the humans even bothered asking about power sources. It would have been impossible for Oannes to explain in Achaean, and at any rate they already had a pretty good idea. Total conversion of matter directly into energy was a theoretical possibility for their own civilization. Such a power unit could be made very small, and used such minute quantities of matter—any matter—as to be effectively inexhaustible. When the bugs were worked out, it would put an end to an energy problem that hadn’t been all that urgent anyway since the development of safe, controlled fusion. Clearly, the Teloi and the Nagommo had, in fact, worked out those bugs.
“So,” Oannes continued, “marooned though we were, our technology made us seem like gods to the humans we encountered, on the lower reaches of the two rivers flowing into the waters where we had arrived. We taught them the arts of civilization, at the limited rate at which they were able to absorb the teaching. We started with an elementary form of writing, and moved on from there. We helped them to rebel against the Teloi. They tore down the slave society in which the Teloi had imprisoned them, and built their own civilization out of its ruins.”
“The Sumerians!” blurted Nagel. “I knew I had heard the name ‘Oannes.’ Not that Mesopotamia is my field, you understand. But the Sumerians had a legend of a kind of, uh, fish-man from the sea who brought the arts of civilization.”
“Yes,” said Oannes ruefully. “Our efforts to prevent primitive humans from regarding us as supernatural have always proven unavailing in the long run. At any rate, we subsequently worked against the Teloi elsewhere, in the various ri
ver valleys where they had erected their slave societies. It wasn’t easy, as we had to act covertly. And as the centuries went by, more and more of us died off, either by violence or old age. I am nearly the last,” he added, with an offhandedness that a human could not have matched, “and I am getting along in years. But the Teloi gradually lost ground, despite their attempt to reestablish their dominance through the creation of Heroes.”
That brought Jason up short. Oannes had used the Achaean word, with its implicit capital “H”. “Uh, you mean like … ?” He indicated Perseus’ sleeping form.
“Yes. The Teloi decided to create a superstock, physically and mentally superior to the general run of humans, to serve them as proxy rulers over the human masses. They used selected human females as surrogate mothers of artificially produced embryos. The public story was that these women had been impregnated by gods, so the offspring were half-divine.
“But once again they miscalculated. The Heroes proved no more amenable to control than ordinary humans—if anything, rather less so. And they were interfertile with other humans—they took spouses among them, and this had the inevitable effect on their primary loyalties, by processes that lie beyond my race’s understanding. In short, the Heroes broke loose from Teloi control, and led their fellow humans into rebellion. A certain Gilgamesh was among the first.
“However, the Teloi are not noted for flexibility and adaptability. By now they have largely withdrawn from the affairs of the more anciently civilized areas, leaving only legends, and are most active in fringe areas like this where the humans are less sophisticated and—” a modest gesture “—there is less interference from us Nagommo. They travel back and forth between here and northern India and northwest Europe and other lands, where they are known by different names—”
“So now we know where the Indo-European pantheon came from,” Nagel muttered to himself. “And why rulers in those same lands always claimed to be descended from demigods.”